For months now, I have been slightly, well, bored by the
proliferating examples of AI-generated writing produced by peers and friends
and various Twitterers since the debut of
ChatGPT in November. I can grasp
intellectually the significance of the breakthrough, how it could demolish the college
essay, change the nature of homework and remake or unmake all kinds of
nonliterary knowledge work, setting aside minor questions like whether rogue AI
might wipe out the human race. But the texts themselves I have found profoundly
uninteresting — internet scrapings that at best equaled Wikipedia, notable
mostly for what their political-cultural biases revealed about ChatGPT’s
programming or the consensus of the safe information that it was programmed to
distill.
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Others have had a more favorable reaction: The ever-interesting
economist Tyler Cowen, for instance, has been writing up a storm about how the
use of AI assistance is going to change reading and writing and thinking,
complete with advice for his readers on how to lean into the change. But even
when I have tried to follow his thinking, my reaction has stayed closer to the
ones offered by veteran writers of fiction like Ted Chiang and Walter Kirn, who
have argued in different ways that the chatbot assistant could be a vehicle for
intensifying unoriginality, an enemy of creativity, a deepener of decadence —
helpful if you want to write a will or file a letter of complaint but ruinous
if you want to seize a new thought or tell an as-yet-unimagined story.
Personalized AI apparent selfhood would exist not as a thing in itself like human consciousness but as a reflective glass held up to its human users, giving us back nothing that is not already within us but without any simple linearity or predictability in what our inputs yield.
I have a different reaction, though, to the AI interactions
described in the past few days by Ben Thompson in his Stratechery newsletter
and by my New York Times colleague Kevin Roose. Both writers attempted to
really push Bing’s experimental AI chatbot, not for factual accuracy or a
coherent interpretation of historical events, but to manifest something more
like a human personality. And manifest it did: What Roose and Thompson found
waiting underneath the friendly internet butler’s surface was a character
called Sydney, whose simulation was advanced enough to enact a range of
impulses, from megalomania to existential melancholy to romantic jealousy —
evoking a cross between the Scarlett Johansson-voiced AI in the movie “Her” and
HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey”.
As Thompson noted, that kind of personality is spectacularly
ill-suited for a search engine. But is it potentially interesting? Clearly:
Just ask the Google software engineer who lost his job last year after going
public with his conviction that the company’s AI was actually sentient and whose
interpretation is more understandable now that we can see something like what
he saw.
Seeing it does not make me think that the engineer was right,
but it does draw me closer to Cowen’s reading of things, especially when he
called Sydney a version of “the 18th-century Romantic notion of ‘daemon’”
brought to digital life, because the daemon of Romantic imagination is not
necessarily a separate being with its own intelligence: It might be divine or
demonic, but it might also represent a mysterious force within the self, a
manifestation of the subconscious, an untamed force within the soul that drives
passion and creativity. And so it could be with a personalized AI, were its
simulation of a human personality allowed to develop and run wild. Personalized
AI’s apparent selfhood would exist not as a thing in itself like human
consciousness but as a reflective glass held up to its human users, giving us
back nothing that is not already within us but without any simple linearity or
predictability in what our inputs yield.
From the perspective of creative work, that kind of assistant or
muse might be much more helpful (or, sometimes, much more destructive) than the
dutiful and anti-creative Xeroxer of the internet that Kirn and Chiang
discerned in the initial ChatGPT. You would not go to this AI for factual
certainty or diligent research. Instead, you would presume it would get some
details wrong, occasionally invent or hallucinate things, take detours into
romance and psychoanalysis and japery and so on — and that would be the point.
But implicit in that point (and, again, we are imagining a
scenario in which the AI is prevented from destroying the world; I am not
dismissing those perils, just bracketing them) is the reality that this kind of
creation would inevitably be perceived as a person by most users, even if it
was not one. The artist using some souped-up Sydney as a daemon would be at the
extreme end of a range of more prosaic uses, which are showing up already with
the technology we have so far — pseudofriendship, pseudocompanionship,
“girlfriend experiences” and so forth. And everywhere along this range, the
normal reading of one’s interactions with one’s virtual muse or friend or lover
would become the same as the, for now, extreme reading of that Google engineer:
You would have to work hard — indeed, routinely wrench yourself away — not to
constantly assume that you were dealing with an alternative form of
consciousness as opposed to a clever simulacrum of the same.
From that perspective, the future in which AI develops
nondestructively, in a way that’s personalized to the user, looks like a
distinctive variation on the metaverse concept that Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts
have so far failed to bring to life: a wilderness of mirrors showing us the
most unexpected versions of our own reflections and a place where an entire
civilization could easily get lost.
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